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Review : Loads of stuff

17 May 1997

HANGING from nearly invisible steel piano wires 10 metres above a concrete floor on a thin glass platform, which picks up your nervous vibrations and turns them into soothing music, might not sound like fun. But it will open your eyes, if not your stomach, to the amazing capabilities of modern materials. That’s the point of “The Challenge of Materials”, the major new gallery which opened this week at the Science Museum, Exhibition Road, London SW7 (Tel&colon; 0171 938 8000, Web&colon; http&colon;//www.nmsi.ac.uk).

The gallery has been two years and £4.5 million in the making, and is stuffed with steel, packed with plastic, and generally spilling over with everything from high-temperature superconductors to paper. You can try materials testing, attempt to match 25 raw materials with their finished product or design a T-shirt based on a full life-cycle analysis.

The materials life cycle is one of the best themes, taking visitors through the stages in a material’s life, from raw to recycled. But don’t miss the excellent introduction to the molecular and microstructures of materials, a gallery charting the development of materials from hot-water bottles and kettles to baby-care products, and a beautiful transparent (male) body showing implants such as hip joints and a penile prosthesis.

By the crick in your neck, you’ll also realise that the Science Museum has a fetish for suspending stuff. The steel frame of a two-storey house and a massive billowing woven steel cloth also dangle over the open areas of the gallery, plus Concorde’s nose cone, a saloon car and gigantic models of atomic structures.

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And suspend your disbelief for the “Perceptions of Materials” section, which challenges ideas about roles for materials with a steel wedding dress by Jeff Banks, ceramic shoes and paper suits.

“The Challenge of Materials” has strong educational tie-ins, catering for everyone from discerning adults to hyperactive six-year-olds who like feeling, squeezing and pressing things. There’s a General National Vocational Qualification pack which explains how to use a visit as part of the curriculum. And in June the museum offers courses for teachers.

The museum team is to be congratulated on an exciting gallery that cleverly conceals exactly how much visitors are learning about materials. Until they get home, that is, and start to notice what the real world is made from. Steve Hill